Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
1/10/2014
A pair of studies released in recent weeks have cast doubt on the affordability of the Obama Administration’s nuclear modernization plan. Shortly before Christmas, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the U.S. could need about $355 billion over the next 10 years to maintain and modernize the nation’s nuclear deterrent, which is $141 billion more than the Obama Administration suggested in 2011. A report this week by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies that looks further into the future put the price tag for maintaining and modernizing the deterrent over the next 30 years at more than $1 trillion.
The reports are largely based on the government’s own modernization estimates, and raise questions about potential “sticker shock” as the costs of modernizing the deterrent rises dramatically over the next three decades, which CNS experts say is likely to be a problem no matter what side of the arms control debate one is on. “This is a balloon rate mortgage,” Jon Wolfsthal, the deputy director of CNS and a former nuclear advisor to Vice President Joseph Biden, said this week at an event unveiling the report. “We are being sold a set of programs which may very much be in the national interest. This is not a debate about whether we need nuclear weapons or not, whether we are going to need more or less. This is simply saying these are going to cost much more than people appreciate they are going to cost.” The main recommendation of the report is that the government provide an all-encompassing, long-range budget forecast for its nuclear deterrent.
Modernization Plan ‘Just Not Real’
The cost of modernization covers a wide range of activities, from efforts to maintain and modernize the National Nuclear Security Administration’s weapons complex and nuclear arsenal to efforts to overhaul the nation’s fleet of nuclear delivery vehicles. Few in the Administration believed it would be cheap, but the costs outlined in the reports have raised eyebrows across the weapons complex and on Capitol Hill. The modernization plan is “just not real,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a CNS expert and one of the authors of the center’s report. “It’s inconceivable to me that we will execute anything like the plan that they say they’re going to do.”
According to the report, spending on the nation’s nuclear deterrent could peak in the late 2020s as efforts to build new long-range strategic bombers, nuclear submarines, a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and modernize the weapons complex converge. According to the CNS report, spending over the next 30 years, for instance, could reach $350 billion for the NNSA, which is planning to overhaul the nuclear arsenal with a strategy that includes life extension work on the B61 nuclear bomb and three interoperable warheads. It also has significant infrastructure needs, and is planning to build a new Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex that recent estimates have suggested could cost anywhere between $10 and $19 billion.
A Long List of Priorities
For the nation’s nuclear delivery vehicles, there’s also a long list of modernization priorities. It could also cost as much as $100 billion for 100 new long-range bombers, between $20 and $120 billion for a new ICBM fleet, and $102 billion for new submarines.”Whether you think we need to maintain a very large nuclear arsenal and that this trillion dollars is well spent or whether you think we can get by with fewer nuclear weapons and this money would be well spent elsewhere, everybody should know what the number is,” Wolfsthal said. “If it turns out it costs this much and the American public and the Congress don’t appreciate it and aren’t prepared for it, they will not fund it.” Lewis said the danger of not coming up with a budget figure that could be sold to the American public and Congress could have dire consequences. “I do not support unilateral nuclear disarmament, but if I did, just keep doing exactly what we’re doing,” Lewis said. “We might really end up with this tiny little denuded force that was developed with no particular strategic thought in mind.”
The CBO found that DOE’s portion of maintaining and modernizing the deterrent would cost about $105 billion over the next 10 years, of which about $77 billion would be needed for work on the nuclear weapons enterprise. The Department of Defense’s share of the nuclear costs would be about $191 billion. The report also notes that other nuclear-related activities, like nonproliferation, nuclear dismantlement, missile defense, and nuclear cleanup, are likely to add another $215 billion more to the estimated price tag over the next decade. However, the budget office said “if costs to modernize weapons and delivery systems and to construct new nuclear facilities continued to grow as they have historically” it would take another $59 billion over the next decade to maintain the deterrent. DOE’s share of the increase would be $29 billion, while DOE’s share would be $30 billion.
‘No Averting the Train Wreck that is NNSA’
NNSA, in particular, has been harshly criticized for cost increases on many of its major projects, and Lewis noted that a recent Government Accountability Office report said the funding levels needed for the agency don’t align with the agency’s plans. “There is no averting the train wreck that is NNSA,” Lewis said, adding that GAO’s conclusions “is the polite, GAO way of saying none of this is going to happen.”
CBO noted that much of the cost to modernize the nation’s warheads, weapons complex and fleet of delivery systems would take place outside the 10-year window that it examined, meaning that future costs could continue to increase. “The longest-range estimates for the nuclear mission produced by the Administration were in 2010 and contained about $214 billion in spending over the fiscal 2011-20 period, but the report omitted significant costs, and the estimate period ends just before the substantial procurement bills come due,” the CBO report said.
